Corporate Knowledge Partners team is dedicated to assist executives and decision-makers to make timely and smart decisions for their short-term operational / business needs and long-term strategic issues, including IT through best practices research from across industries and around the world, as well as through analysis of their existing business processes

Saturday, August 15, 2009

Search results are often a list of relevant matching criteria based on interpretation of searched phrase by the search engine. This is often due to the fact that the search engines do not really know their customer's profile or Savvy level on the subject they are searching, but based on best probability relevance! Hence the result set is driven by the best choices the search engine can produce based on the algorithm the engineers have evolved. Perhaps it's time for better marriage of Web 2.0 interface and the search engines.

When I look at the content searching web sites, there are number of them and each of them emphasizes on the efficiency of their search engine and methodology, but not much is done on the presentation of the information back to the user. An approach could be leveraging the context in the search when building the Thesaurus-based Search indexing with attributes from the users and then displaying in a catalog mode with relevant contextual information. Example - An user from Southern India looking for math School books for grade 7th would be different than a user who is searching for the same thing in Tokyo or London. Showing results that provides additional dimension like - what are other people in the area has higher click when they are searching with similar phrase or if an teacher is searching from Tokyo what content has higher hit vs when a student is searching with the same phrase. Perhaps user defining their profile to assist the search engine to provide more actionable relevant results with dimensions to drill-down to the content or information in their search results that they believe is more relevant to them and save resources to render the content not relevant to them. This approach could enable users to reach their content relatively quickly.

Think about it, if you are an advanced golfer, looking for golf clubs, possibility would be high that they are probable looking for fine quality clubs, thus the search result can list dimension with high value to the professionals like specification, Price range, Type of Clubs, Purpose, How would they buy so on so forth so that the messaging can be more focused bringing in the sellers, Bloggers, eCommerce site, so on so forth together for a sweeter user experience and Web 2.0 interfacing is key to this experience. This can potentially assist eCommerce vendors to re-align their inventory hubs for shorter turn around in responding to the customer and their usage patterns. For example, eBay sellers would benefit from this information to message their product listing in such a way that messaging is focused for their targeted customer and listing their products in the appropriate category, listing price, more value to their customer so on so forth ...

Now, this approach will initiate a whole new world of search service for various other service companies who can package the results for a specific target audience. Search companies can also gain some extra money by selling these services for the indexing that they have already done for their bread and butter. This will also promote a new ecosystem of collaboration in internet marketing and interesting application with vertical searching industry leveraging content.

I believe this will promote reduction in replication of content as well and contribute to the cause of green ecology for future. It's time for consuming more of Web 2.0 interface into the higher value internet applications for more actionable search results.

Reference:1. Kosmix: It is Wikipedia meets Google search meets Answers.com2. MeeHive: It is an interesting cross between Google News, Google Reader, and social news sites like socialmedian3. NewsGator: Inbox for Outlook integrating RSS feeds (and Usenet news) with an email client. NewsGator lets you read, archive, organize and search news with all the power of Outlook